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Project 2025: Abortion policy

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The Supreme Court is a threat to American democracy

Claim: Trump’s executive orders on Covid-19 economic relief are illegal. Fact check: Mixed

Claim: Trump’s executive orders on Covid-19 economic relief are illegal. Fact check: Mixed
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Brian Johnson, Medill School
By Brian Johnson, Medill SchoolAug 13, 2020
Brian Johnson, Medill School
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On Saturday, President Trump signed three memorandums and one executive order that are designed to help Americans dealing with the economic downturn as a result of the coronavirus lock-down. The three memorandums address student loan payment relief, deferring payroll tax obligations, and using emergency funds to provide economic relief to states and people who are unemployed. The executive order deals with rent relief. The legality of the memorandum on the use of emergency funds for relief has been questioned, and may be on shakier legal ground compared to the other measures. The three other actions may fall within the president's purview because the president has the authority to delay student loan payments and defer taxes in times of disaster, and the order on rent relief is less sweeping than some initially thought.

The order on rent relief states: "Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Director of CDC shall consider whether any measures temporarily halting residential evictions of any tenants for failure to pay rent are reasonably necessary to prevent the further spread of COVID-19." The memorandum also states that the heads of other agencies should identify funds to be used to help renters and should try to help renters avoid eviction. It does not state exactly what actions or funds are to be used, and it doesn't impose strict requirements on these agencies to take a specific action.

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Trump may not have the authority to create enhanced unemployment programs because the Stafford Disaster Relief Act allows the president to give unemployment aid only to those not eligible for other unemployment benefits, and it does not allow the amount given to unemployed people to exceed the normal amount of unemployment benefits given to them by the state.

In the memorandums on student loans and tax deferment, Trump referenced specific laws that allow the president to delay or defer payments in times of disaster or economic hardship. The president can delay student loans for up to three years for people who experience economic hardship. Additionally, the president can defer collection of federal taxes during a disaster.

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Project 2025: The Department of Labor

Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is an ambitious manifesto to redesign the federal government and its many administrative agencies to support and sustain neo-conservative dominance for the next decade. One of the agencies in its crosshairs is the Department of Labor, as well as its affiliated agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Project 2025 proposes a remake of the Department of Labor in order to roll back decades of labor laws and rights amidst a nostalgic “back to the future” framing based on race, gender, religion and anti-abortion sentiment. But oddly, tucked into the corners of the document are some real nuggets of innovative and progressive thinking that propose certain labor rights which even many liberals have never dared to propose.

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Preamble to the U.S. Constitution
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We can’t amend 'We the People' but 'we' do need a constitutional reboot

LaRue writes at Structure Matters. He is former deputy director of the Eisenhower Institute and of the American Society of International Law.

The following article was accepted for publication prior to the attempted assassination attempt of Donald Trump. Both the author and the editors determined no changes were necessary.

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Beau Breslin on C-SPAN
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Project 2025: A C-SPAN interview

Beau Breslin, a regular contributor to The Fulcrum, was recently interviewed on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” about Project 2025.

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.” He writes “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a Fulcrum series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”

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People protesting laws against homelessness

People protest outside the Supreme Court as the justices prepared to hear Grants Pass v. Johnson on April 22.

Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

High court upholds law criminalizing homelessness, making things worse

Herring is an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, co-author of an amicus brief in Johnson v. Grants Pass and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.

In late June, the Supreme Court decided in the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass that the government can criminalize homelessness. In the court’s 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines, the conservative justices ruled that bans on sleeping in public when there are no shelter beds available do not violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

This ruling will only make homelessness worse. It may also propel U.S. localities into a “race to the bottom” in passing increasingly punitive policies aimed at locking up or banishing the unhoused.

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Project 2025: A federal Parents' Bill of Rights

Republican House members hold a press event to highlight the introduction in 2023.

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Project 2025: A federal Parents' Bill of Rights

Biffle is a podcast host and contributor at BillTrack50.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, includes an outline for a Parents' Bill of Rights, cementing parental considerations as a “top tier” right.

The proposal calls for passing legislation to ensure families have a "fair hearing in court when the federal government enforces policies that undermine their rights to raise, educate, and care for their children." Further, “the law would require the government to satisfy ‘strict scrutiny’ — the highest standard of judicial review — when the government infringes parental rights.”

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